


A Ghost that Lingers

by Cosmicobit



Series: The Ghosts of Green and Grey [1]
Category: Red vs. Blue
Genre: F/M, coworkers to lovers to tragic ex lovers, emicus, implied major character death, some battle related gore
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-19
Updated: 2017-02-19
Packaged: 2018-09-25 16:16:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 13
Words: 8,686
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9828824
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cosmicobit/pseuds/Cosmicobit
Summary: Locus has turned himself in to authorities on Chorus, and now awaits capital punishment. While incarcerated, Dr. Grey comes to see him. As they talk, Locus flashes back a brief affair they once had, which he broke off when he realized it could compromise his mission--and his commitment to it.





	1. Chapter 1

“You actually came back here,” she says.

It’s with these words that she alerts him to her presence. Airy words, her happiness cracking, her glowing levity intact. She stands several feet back from the clear plastic wall of the cell they’ve placed him in.

”There's nothing else left that I can do,” Ortez tells her. His tone has always been so flat, and this time is no different. But he can hear a subtle vindication in himself that he wonders if she, too, can detect: there is a confidence in him that he has done something right, has contributed something in the way of restitution in the time between his flight from Chorus and his voluntary return.

If she does sense that confidence, the look in Emily Grey’s bright eyes is enough to steal it back from him—not so much _shaking_ it as subjecting it to a deep and slow disturbance, like movement in the plates beneath continents.

“By which you mean,” she says, ever icier beneath her lightheartedness, “that you’ve run out of pirates to kill and anonymous tips to give.  But I suppose you think that fixed everything.”

“No. Not anymore.”

She makes a small sound, one that cracks in the middle to betray some emotion he can’t name, before speaking.

“ _Good_. Because it doesn’t.”

* * *

 

When he’d arrived on Chorus, he’d found her disturbing. Too happy, too pleasant on the surface, too dark within. She was morbid. She rattled off battle statistics like a lunch menu, insisted he was just the addition they needed _if_ his resume was accurate, chattered about how she could have maiming and amputation and the issues that come with their youngest soldiers’ growing bones crammed into armor to worry about, rather than death after death after death. “I’m a doctor,” she told him, “not a mortician! Not that we have time to prep anyone for a lengthy funeral anymore.”

He had watched her warily as she spoke, looking from her to the Federal Army’s commander at the time, a woman called Alyovna too capable to be allowed to live much longer. She threw him a look as if to say _you’re on your own with this one,_ before stepping out.

Locus set his shotgun down on the counter beside the sink where the doctor stood, smiling, as she scrubbed away the blood of a previous patient which had spread above the barrier of her gloves up to her wrists. She glanced at the gun, and her face illuminated, eyes so sharp and so brilliant they were alarming; honing in on the weapon like a bird of prey might look at a mouse.

“Oh,” she exclaimed, “would you look at what you’ve done to that! You must know _something_ about what you’re doing after all—that’s the Charon 200 concussive model on the rail there, isn’t it? That’s a _rare_ one since they phased it out for the 300, probably for the best: _Much_ improved balance on that one.”

He happened to like the 200 model specifically for its unusual balance: it allowed him to throw it if needed with an almost boomerang-like result—Extremely useful in melee combat, which he otherwise did not prefer, despite his choice in weapon.

“The doctor knows firearms,” he said. It was not a question, though he permitted a wary incredulousness in his voice that went only partially muted by his helmet’s filter.

“Of course I do, silly. This is a war zone: we always need more experts!”

“And _you_ ,” this tiny doctor, thin from a rationed diet, unshapely but for graceful hips heavier with the shape of her bones than the curve of fat or muscle, looked to him too fragile, to dexterous, to be suited to the kick and range of a weapon like his, “have specialized in shotguns.”

“Of course not. I’ve specialized in everything. I have a 240 IQ and nothing else to do all day but sew up half-dead soldiers, after all—believe it or not, your physical is the most exciting thing I’m going to get to do all day! Now, take off all of your armor.”


	2. Chapter 2

If there was a single _right_ to letting himself be captured sooner, it would have been to bring Emily a quicker peace. But that alone is not enough to make him regret his timing, for to truly _amend_ what he’d done to her—however briefly—would be to amend for every second he’d spent upholding the lie that he was on Chorus to _help_ anyone. This fact is all too apparent as she takes a step closer to him, narrowed, saddened eyes at odds with a subtly, barely quivering lip that peels back across her words like a warning snarl.

“How much did you actually do?” she demands. “How many years did you add to the war, _Locus?_ ”

“As I said in the hearing—every piece of advice I gave, every victory I guaranteed you, every mistake I made in leading you, was calculated. We maintained the balance of power between both armies for the duration of our employment.”

“ _That_ is _not_ a good enough answer. _How many times did you prevent peace?_ I want a number. _”_

That’s a hard thing to offer. He doesn’t know his kill count on the battlefield, let alone the deaths indirectly related to him through his orders. He offers the most concrete number he can.

“Of the six assassinations that took place in my time here, I was responsible for five.”

“Five. Including General Alyovna, I imagine. And General Eirson? _Four years ago?_ Was that really a battle death?”

“He was shot by a Republican soldier.”

She doesn’t have to tell him that the answer isn’t satisfactory. He can see it in her ice pick stare, cold as the base where she had so nearly been left behind. Where, if he had hesitated—and he no longer doubts that he would have, if only for a single amateur second—Felix would have shot her down where she stood. Or fell. He can imagine her on her knees in the snow, staring at the space where the simulation troopers had stood only an instant before, only milliseconds from her reach. How different things would have been in that other reality where she didn’t escape alongside them, he doesn’t wish to know—what he does know is that Felix would have been gloating beside him, had it happened that way. Taunting him with the success they were so wrong to have sought.

Chorus was a mission too far.

He knows that now.

“The soldier knew where Eirson would be,” he confesses.

Emily’s hands tighten, white knuckled with her fingernails dug into her biceps, her crossed arms holding together her body.

* * *

 

“Ooooh, you are like a map of armor deficiencies—is this one here why you switched to the infiltrator?”

She pointed to a long discolored line of slightly puckered scar tissue running horizontally across his abdomen.

 She was correct in her deduction: Locus had worn, for the first few months of his deployment, a chest harness with considerably more coverage. It had seemed ideal until the day that a building he was taking cover in collapsed across his shoulders, doubling him over at every wrong angle and jamming his own armor down into his lower floating ribs. He broke every one of them, and punctured multiple organs. He would have died, if not for their extraordinary field medic. As such, even by the time he reached Chorus, he retained a trust in medics akin to an irrational but unshakeable faith. Felix liked to remind him that he was a survivor by nature. But medics, he knew, deserved no small amount of credit.

Emily Grey was proving slowly but surely to be no exception. Her eccentricity and constant euphoric chatter notwithstanding, her hands and instruments moved over him with precision. Her merciless palpating belayed an unexpected gentleness to the treatment of healing wounds: She _tsk_ ed him and she studied a scab that had opened across his shoulder. She chastised him about the necessity of more thorough coverage on such a high flexion area, fussed about the possibility of infection despite the suit’s internal sanitization, but under the chatter and the lecturing which earned her only flat retorts and scowls, her dabbing and sealing of the wound was kind and careful. Sometimes merciless, sometimes tender, he found he didn’t overly object to her touch, despite the enormous unpleasantness of being without his armor.

Her directness, not softened by her too-forced smile, was likewise appreciable.

“Are those ocular implants?”

There was no gawking, no spectacle, she asked him with a datapad at the ready. The question was clinical, as was his answer.

“Yes. UNSC medical issue.”

“Oh, good to know. Is the blindness related to the facial scarring?”

Not exactly. Both were connected to the armor, to the war, but not to the same incident. He told her ‘’no,” and the clarifying questions that followed were succinct. And the way she looked him in the eye, crow’s feet tearing at the corners of hers though for the moment her smile had faded to an expression almost-neutral, spoke to a bitter understanding of brokenness. This insane and genius surgeon understood soldiers.

When she was finished with her exam, he found she was no longer disturbing, only mildly irritating. And it was very possible, he concluded, that she might prove in time to be the only person in the federal army, however unstable, worthy of his respect, and tolerable to converse with.

 

 


	3. Chapter 3

“Because of you. They knew who to shoot and when because of you.”

“Because I relayed the information to . . . Felix, yes.”

Ortez has tried, and in some small and partial way succeeded, recalling his own name. But he still cannot say _Gates,_ and certainly never _Isaac._ Even if he could, surely Emily would not care for such humanization of the Republican mercenary. Her pointed use of his own codename suggests she doesn’t much desire to see him as a person, either. Perhaps it is too painful.

Her next words are alarmingly even.

“So. Four years, at least. That’s how long ago we might have had a cease fire.”

“It wouldn’t have held.”

“ _How would you know?”_

Her calm breaks with the force of a detonation.

_Because the Federal Army and New Republic wouldn’t have wanted it to._

They were still too confident, then, in their hate and their causes. Locus and Felix had only increased the casualties they’d already incurred upon themselves with their philosophies.

But he doesn’t tell her that.

“. . . You’re right.” _You’re always right_. “I don’t know. And you deserved the chance that it would.”

“Is that supposed to be an apology?” she demands, something like horror in her eyes that he can’t fathom.

“It’s an acknowledgement.”

An apology is _words._ It means nothing.

_This means much more; It’s why I’ve said it._

He likes to imagine that in the crinkling of her brow—like the prelude to the collapse of her entire expression—that there is proof that she understands as much.

 

* * *

 

As Doctor Grey picked fragments of Felix's bullets out of Locus’ thigh sans-anesthetic, she did not smile. She never smiled over wounds, real wounds.

“Frangible rounds are such a mess,” she said, her chirping tone subdued. “This _leg_ is a mess. You're awfully lucky, I don’t know how this missed that femoral artery.”

Good aim. Careful timing.

“Their mercenary doesn’t calibrate his scopes with any diligence.”

It wasn’t a lie. He'd been cautious about today’s shot taking down no more than Locus’ shields, but that care was not characteristic of Felix, given his enormous preference for smaller firearms and closer combat. Given his way, his only scope would have been his HUD. It was _not_ a lie.

Lying to someone with her keen perception and interest in psychology was unwise. He had no desire to test her perception of his tone or expression or eyes. 

If she did detect anything wrong with the statement, she didn’t voice it.

“Still, you're a lucky one. And not only did you live through this, it probably saved your life. Small world!”

She was referring to the mines Felix's men had detonated shortly after he had been removed from the field for his injury.

“Indeed.”

She glanced up at him, pausing in her digging and picking, bloody forceps hovering over his bare leg. Repairs to an undersuit aren't unduly difficult, and she'd cut his away from the injury down. He could feel the still-lucid injured in the room seeking out the sight of the exposed limb, searching for any indication of what the second skin of his human body looked like outside of the primary skin of his armor.

Dr. Grey didn’t seem to care this time any more than she had last time what he looked like—his use to her wasn’t dependent on who he was, only what.

He avoided her eyes. He could never process the color of them. In his mind, he sometimes remembered them as dark, other times pale as her name. All he could really see when he looked at them was brightness, sharpness like her scalpel. She looked at him rather longer than a professional should, taking in something in the inscrutable dome of his helmet.

“My,” she exclaimed after a beat of this intense _looking,_ recovering her façade, “you're just unfazed by all of this, aren't you?”

“I'm a soldier. War is my job.”

She hummed, and returned to digging through his shredded tissue. He clenched his hands and his teeth, but did not complain as the pain screamed through his leg, from hip to heel. He was swimming in it, blocking out the feeling along with everything else in the room, when he became aware of her eyes on him again. The expression, he thought, seemed scrutinizing.

“What?” he demanded. He spoke through his gritted teeth.

“As much as you scare our troops,” she declared airily, “you might be good for morale after all.”

“One cannot inspire troops from off the field; if you would please finish the leg.” Polite words, harshly spoken.

“I am finished, dear,” she retorted, the pet-name bitter and mocking on her sweet tongue. “All you need now is to be sewn shut!”

“I can do that myself with biofoam and a bandage.”

“Excellent. I really do have more important things to do now that we're sure our most vital military asset won't be dying of infection and blood loss. Come see me again tomorrow to follow up—I'm going to go find out if Johnson has died from all that concussive organ damage or not. Now _that_ was someone who I thought we'd lose… here's a bandage roll. Tomorrow, 8am.”

She _would_ lose Johnson. His resilience would mark him for death. Locus would put a shot through the back of his head not long after this conversation, under cover of rebel gunfire.


	4. Chapter 4

“You are a monster,” she declares softly. Simply.

“I know.”

 _I know, I know—_ he’s there again, in an alley with a shotgun and then-Private Gates at his side. He’s at the Last Battle again, a squad-mate dead at his feet, reduced in value to nothing more than another source of ammo. He’s with Siris. He’s staring down the scope into the room where a peace treaty was to be conceived, and the blood is dark on the dirty table, the chairs, their armor, the walls. He’s looking down into Emily’s eyes in the dark and her hand on his face smell antiseptic _—I know._


	5. Chapter 5

Locus managed to limp his way into her office the next morning by virtue of power armor alone.

“Oh, dear. I don’t like the look of that. Strip down and sit down!” She declared, taking him in with lifted brows and wide eyes. The doctor had her frazzled braid tied up atop her head in a massive, dark knot and had yanked gloves onto her hands by the time he’d worked his way out of his armor and the newly repaired undersuit. The disadvantage of the suit being more or less one piece—to take any of it off without cutting it, almost all of it had to come along.

“Is this necessary?”

“Of course it is. I actually have time to have a proper look at you today—that means I need all of that armor and interference out of my way. You’ll need to make that leg accessible for a bandage change as well . . . I don’t like this at all.”

She bent low over his thigh without pausing to prepare him, her proximity sudden and unwelcome, her grip firm on his leg with one hand, the other preoccupied with tracing the bloodstain trapped in yesterday’s bandage.

“You’ve popped a stitch already. What part of bed rest was difficult for you to understand?”

“You didn’t order me to rest.”

“Did I not? Oh, well. One would have thought it was implied—there’s a hole in your leg, you know. With lots of little holes inside it—do you like your muscles, Locus?”

“Excuse me?”

“Your leg muscles. Particularly your adductor longus and vastus medialis—do you like them functional?”

“Of course.”

“Then _stay off this leg._ For the next week, at least. This is not at all what this should look like . . . well, thank goodness for bandages I suppose! At _least_ it isn’t infected. As much as I love bionic prosthetics, they take so much adjusting to. You’re no good to us if you don’t remember how to move . . .  well, on the field. I suppose you must know something about strategy with your background, too.”

She chattered mercilessly as she cut free the stitches from yesterday, blood welling around the red-edged mouth of the re-opening wound, dark on her pale gloves and his thick, dark thigh. It was swollen today.

“What background?”

“Did you think they didn’t talk to me before they hired you? I know _all about_ your military record.  Corporal well on your way to Sergeant in less than two years, scout sniper, honorably discharged due to injury. Which of all those scars did that, I wonder?”

 _Most of them._ He declined to answer her with anything but a scowl, but she wasn’t looking at his face, anyway. She was too preoccupied by the wreckage of his leg.

“Yep,” she declared as he winced unwillingly away from a particularly nasty prod into his shredded muscle, the smallest movement marked by a quick inhale through gritted teeth, “you’re not going _anywhere_ near a battle for a while. Or scouting. I hope you like office work!”

“I am not your secretary.”

“Of _course_ not, most of _those_ have rank now. Too many dead superiors! _Actually,_ given how little combat experience some of our officers have these days, you’re probably more qualified than half of them—doesn’t this work out well?! When we’re done here, your job is to _not. Move._ While I go get General Eirson and put something together—I wouldn’t argue, if I were you. There’s no reason to pay you if you aren’t doing anything useful, after all!”

She couldn’t fathom, of course, the kind of convenience she was really handing him. His blank face could have given nothing away, and she had no reason to suspect him of anything, except a history with Felix. But he’d explained that false history already—what she knew about his service record wouldn’t be enough to save her, or anyone else on this pathetically broken planet.


	6. Chapter 6

The silence is long. There is too much happening behind his eyes for him to see her clearly. Too much red and too many screaming wide-eyed faces beneath shattered helmets. Too much armor-paled skin in tangled sheets. _I_ am _sorry, Emily._

* * *

 

Doctor Emily Grey became an inescapable presence for the next three and a half weeks. An admirable surgeon, she was not infallible, as became all too evident when, after a week of healing, his leg felt exponentially worse. Further examination revealed a missed scrap of shrapnel imbedded so deep in the muscle it was in danger of working its way out the other side.

When next he saw Felix, Locus was going to shoot chunks out of him.

Biofoam and continued treatment had healed the entry point of the wound by then, leaving him in Doctor Grey’s eccentrically capable hands for surgery as well as recovery. Her constant presence, if loud and sometimes invasive, given that she was disturbingly astute, proved more tolerable than he’d have expected. Her unending chatter was, at the very least, intelligent and informative. Very informative: she detailed whole histories of alien weaponry on whims, all but diagramed her own attempts at reverse engineering Chorus’ ample ancient tools of war at the slightest hint of interest.

Her enthusiasm was her people’s worst enemy. Locus did not pity her. Trust earns what it will.

Where he hadn’t expected to see her however, was after that. Yet she was in every briefing room, in every meeting, in every discussion of tactics, strategy, troop movements and attacks, but perhaps he shouldn’t have been surprised. She read patterns in Felix’s carefully planned maneuvering, saw holes they hadn’t planned, and opportunities Locus spent long nights on his private frequency relaying to Felix that he might lose an appropriate number of soldiers to satisfy his own Feds, without obliterating the News. What she lacked in traditional military knowledge and experience she made up for in leaps and bounds of insight Locus was careful to seek in carefully measured doses. He’d suspected she could be dangerous, but his work with her in the course of his “bed rest” proved it.

It was Control who determined that she should be left alive. _Her knowledge of Chorus’ artifacts is working to our advantage. You will_ not _eliminate a valuable resource without my express order. I trust you can monitor her effectively until then? Or was the stealth I hired you for overhyped?_

It wasn’t, and he kept Doctor Grey at a reasonably close distance despite the hazards of her insatiable curiosity.

It was in that time that she appeared to decide she liked him—perhaps the only member of the Federal Army who did. She engaged him in her one-sided conversations at opportunities she could easily have dismissed: before briefings, whenever they found each other moving—slowly, in Locus’ case—in similar directions _,_ in the mess hall of the snowy base where they spent the majority of his recovery. And whatever trust in him the promise of payment had already encouraged in the Federal Army’s leadership, this moderate affection only solidified. The degree of control over the army’s movements that he possessed by the time he returned to active duty was so astounding so as to drive Felix meaner than usual with envy.

_You’ve got it so fucking easy over there, asshole._

_You chose the Feds._

_I hate you._

_What kind of supply convoy could I position for you that would silence your whining?_

He’d chosen food over weapons. Locus made a point of allowing the Feds a few other victories, too, lest morale break in their dire straits. Doctor Grey complained to him about it on more than one occasion, dragging him into an argument over the likelihood of a spy in their ranks versus the simple necessity of more creative tactics.

 _“We are too predictable,”_ he’d told her

_“Your orders look nothing like anything else we’ve tried, they have no point of reference!”_

_“They have Felix.”_

_“Who knows you so well he can predict your movements? Either there is a mole in the Federal Army, or we have a new primary target.”_

“NO. _Felix is mine. I’ve made that clear in my contract.”_

_“Ridiculous.”_

Her righteous frustration was as close as he’d ever seen her come to truly unhappy—evidence that her brilliant mind was not entirely broken beneath the veneer of her cheer.

It was this that solidified his grudging respect. In a sea of meaningless, naïve, belligerent people, she was an island of sense and worth. Going forward, he treated her with decorum unheard of in his usual course bluntness. Unlike the incompetent brass whose “orders” he “followed,” he found she was deserving of it.

 

***

Locus’ return to the field marked the most fascinating shift in Emily that she would ever display: more than the mere partiality of before, she now exhibited an evident _interest_ in his wellbeing. It was a subtle thing, but detectable, even though the only indication of it was the order in which she attended to all but the most critical patients. Once the near-death were dealt with, he became without fail her first examination. Follow-ups on his leg. Genuine assessment of minor damage.

“You’re no good to us wounded,” she chided when he protested. It wasn’t the first time she’d said it, but it was the first time he knew it to be a lie.

He found he didn’t mind.

_  
_


	7. Chapter 7

She is, of course, the first to speak again.

“I want to know why you ever let me kiss you.”

This he wasn’t prepared for. It hits him like a blow, knocking the breath from him so that all he can do is stare at her.

“ _Tell me.”_

“Because it was what you wanted.”

“Oh, oh no. Don’t you dare put this on me. You were hired to kill me and everyone I have ever loved,” her voice turns singsong for a wrenching moment. “I want to know why someone in that position would _want_ to indulge me.”

“Because I _wanted_ to give you what you wanted.” They are hard words to say. “Because you are the most intelligent, skilled, dedicated and worthy person I have ever met.”

* * *

 

The next time he was required to see her came courtesy of a head injury. For once, the damage wasn’t entirely Felix’s fault, which is why it had come about. Felix knew better than to risk a head wound—the compromised mind of concussion was as dangerous as it was inconvenient. He had disabled Locus’ camo, though, however adamantly he denied the relevance of that action as he berated Locus for the inconvenience of his having been _shot._

Emily was no such nuisance: her commentary was surprisingly sparse as she inspected his skull and the scoring on his helmet in turn, her only comment for a long while—aside from questioning him about where it hurt, if it hurt, what day it was, how his memory was, could he move all of his extremities—was to airily declare their good fortune.

“Aren’t _you_ lucky that this soldier is a terrible shot! This one really _could_ have killed you.”

“Was a terrible shot. I eliminated him immediately.”

“Oh—well, good. That means your aim is still sound . . . would you say you had to rely more on your HUD than usual to make that shot?”

“No.”

But he had, immediately thereafter, been stricken with a nauseating dizziness and passed out, hence his presence here.

Emily hummed to herself, sweeping her medical scanner over him once more. She frowned over the results. Locus had been concussed many times in his life—perhaps she was puzzling over the array of damages in his brain that this one shot cannot account for, perhaps measuring their impact on his recovery this time. For his part, he was certain it wouldn’t be long: he’d had worse. The whiplash was the only truly notable part.

“My head will be fine. Check my neck for strain.”

“Don’t tell me how to do my job, Locus,” she all but sang, “I’ll get there when I get there. Now, I need to check your eyes.”

He glanced into her face, searching her eyes and the manic half smile creeping into her mouth.

“How?”

“Good old fashioned light test! Don’t worry, it only hurts for a minute. And if those implants are good for anything, they’ll compensate just fine so long as all that fancy wiring to your brain is still behaving!”

“You are a sadist,” he declared frankly—more of a statement than anything.

“Oh, I hardly like hurting people. But your pain response is just _deliciously_ unusual, I suspect it’s dissociative _—_ ”

Locus did his best to glare at her, knowing the look was more tired than anything.

“Get it over with please, Doctor.”

All too cheery, she fetched a penlight. She took his jaw in her hand—a momentarily shocking gesture, his face so foreign to him and her gloved hand so gentle and clingingly latex-textured—to tilt his head to the angle she required. He was conscious of her looking so _directly_ into his eyes—

He smothered the sudden adrenaline of fight or flight beneath such scrutinizing and intimate attention with the comforting knowledge that her searching was nothing more than cold science.

The light in his eye, when it appeared, sent a bolt of pain through his skull that landed like a missile hitting home, a pain with an epicenter and a shockwave—as if lightning were splitting his brain. He snarled without flinching.

The light disappeared an instant later, though all he could see in its absence was neon and purple spots of shapeless blur everywhere he tried to look. He couldn’t read her expression as she stood there, motionless, wordless, with her tiny, fragile, dexterous hand still resting against his jaw. She left it there far too long.


	8. Chapter 8

“ _Worthy,”_ she snaps. “You still don’t understand it, do you, Locus? _You_ do not get to decide the value of human lives.”

He bows his head before he speaks, unable, for a moment, to look into her eyes or anywhere near them any longer.

“I mean worthy of _admiration,_ Doctor.”

She seems to be taken aback by that: literally inching a step further from the door of his cell, she looks at him like a wild animal looks at someone who treats it gently while it’s cornered.

“Admiration. You let me—you slept with me out of _respect?_ You betrayed my trust in every possible way because you thought I was _worthwhile?_ ” Her voice grows louder and harsher with every word. “How dare you!”

Ortez can say nothing. His throat is closed and his mind is blank. He can _offer_ _nothing._

“How dare you.” She says it again, now a whisper. “How. Dare you.”

* * *

 

“What’s going on?”

The base was a blur, frantic soldiers and bewildered, useless brass. Locus likely knew the answer already, though the effects are more impressive than he’d expected when he’d sent his men to prepare it. Felix must have coordinated it well.

“Didn’t you hear?!” Emily gasped. “The New Republic infiltrated the outpost on Aria Peninsula.”

“What did they take?”

“Nothing! They blew it up! All of our off-site munitions for the entire southern theatre gone, for nothing!”

Locus grunted.

“Would you have preferred they have stolen considerable firepower?”

“Of _course_ not, Locus. But there were people in there . . .” she caught her tone before dismay could shatter into grief and destroy the imagined, pleasant place in which her mind lived. “It was a suicide mission—I’ll give them this, they’re committed to their senseless tactics!”

“I doubt it was senseless, if all of the Federal Army allows this much detriment to their morale.”

Emily glowered at him, staring straight into his eyes. His helmet was already off in anticipation of a follow-up with the penlight—he was all too ready to return to the field, rendering a recheck necessary for her approval. He was her only patient in that hour: Emily’s office was empty except for the two of them though the world bustled on outside.

“Anger is not a _detriment,”_ she insisted, words in danger of becoming genuinely aggressive softened only by melting into a huff, “and I reserve the right to take a _few_ moments to resent this. Besides, _I_ think there’s a lesson to be learned here if, gods forbid, you indulge an _iota_ of emotion.”

Locus set his helmet aside on her desk, and crossed his arms.

“I doubt that. It’s war, people die. Wasting the energy of being upset is pointless.”

“Oh? What happens when that energy inspires you?”

There was an odd glint in her eyes he made a point of avoiding.

“Reliable morale is derived from duty, not wasting focus on grief.”

“I don’t just mean the _soldiers,_ silly.”

Locus frowned. “Then I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

He meant to condemn this nonsensical conversation—he knew he was right, because he knew that the incendiary and short-lived morale boost of death was precisely why he and Felix staged this little show to begin with. He already understood everything she could possibly say. Allowing her to debate him now would accomplish nothing but to cut into his appointment and delay his return to the field. Why he’d indulged her even this long, he didn’t know.

There were a great many things about his behavior toward her, these days, that he was wary to understand.

But Emily was not done with him. She drew a step closer to him in the small field office, staring up at him with those manically bright, wise eyes, as she made her official statement.

As frankly as a casualty report, she said:

“I’m talking about how little incidents like this remind us noncombatants how likely we all are to die any minute.”

“That is not new information.”

“Oh, I’m not saying it is! But it’s a whole buffet of food for thought, in times like these.”

_Do not—_

“What _kind_ of thought?” The words were as unimpressed as he could render them, with wariness beneath their surface. The wild glint in her eyes, her proximity—his pulse had picked up, by now, and even he could sense the kind of tension that every beat now increased between them, however much he tried to block it out. _You are a soldier. You do not have time for this._

Just as he should not have wasted time allowing his jaw to rest against her hand. Allowing her to _attempt_ conversation about mundane, irrelevant information even after she had finished sharing anything of strategic value. Allowing wasted moments of deference and attention he afforded no one else.

This damaged, genius, admirable woman—he _should_ have known better.

But then, what did it matter, if it kept her forthcoming? This was the rationale he offered himself, even as her words set a fire in his skull.

“The thought of how silly it would be,” she explained, “not to take advantage of life’s simple pleasures while we last. _I’d_ say that’s interesting, wouldn’t you?”

“Perhaps,” Locus allowed, knowing he was incrementally leaning toward her as he did, looming over her with his armored chest and hers almost close enough to touch.

The words were not wholly out of his mouth when her hands took hold of his face, warm little palms, and dragged him down to kiss him.

His hands drifting to rest on the swell of her hips, he let her.

***

She pushed him backward onto her desk and climbed atop him, the first time. It was an easy thing, motions he knew, and Emily’s enthusiastic efficiency was not absent from her intimacy any more than was her constant vocalizing. She was a squealing, purring thing with probing, fearless hands and fingers that she pressed into the spaces between his ribs and the rise of his shoulders, and gripped him tighter when he took hold of her dark curls and dragged her back to his mouth for kiss upon kiss until he breathed her more so than air and their lips grew tender.

It was not much different the second time, nor the third, the fourth, the fifth. Their trysts were sporadic and eager, usually constrained by time and work and war. When they did meet by night, with time of their own to spend, he did not fall asleep in her bed, though she often did in his, offering the opportunity to explore the landscape of her skin. She had spent her life in either safety or armor, and the topography of Emily was soft and smooth, though never tender. She liked to be held hard, liked the shadows of his fingertips still pressed into her thighs long after his hands had left her. Locus never touched her as she slept.

There were times when she sprawled across his chest, a welcome weight with the smell of her hair pressed under his nose, and slept that way, and still he did not touch her.

There were times that as she drifted off, her head tucked under his chin, that she reached with a tired, aimless hand to drag his arm by his wrist around her waist where it settled, its weight and the reflexive movement of muscles pulling her tighter against him. Times when, as one hand held her waist, the other fell to where her arm draped over his side to rest upon the cot or mattress or bunk—what was available wherever they were—and laid across it, his fingers wrapped around her wrist, his thumb moving from time to time back and forth across her skin. Times when he breathed her in with his nose buried in her gentle, wavy curls.

But that wasn’t _touching._ Reaching. Wanting.

Not really. It didn’t count, if it was only at her request. Not when his feelings about the matter were irrelevant. Keeping her close and allowing her to confide was his duty—were his orders. Nothing more. And he held her knowing all the while that there would come a day where her bravery and genius would get her killed, one way or another. If he weakened to any sentimentality, it was only the hope that it would be him, and not Felix—who would never fathom how unfortunate a loss she would be were it not such a dire necessity—to kill her, and quickly. That much, she certainly deserved. The pang in the left of his chest that struck sometimes as he kissed her was his proof.

If she noticed how much harder he held her, how desperately deeply he kissed her in these moments, she didn’t comment on it.


	9. Chapter 9

“I did care for you.”

He can hardly get the words through, a feeling like a grate closed over his throat straining the sound, but he manages. He manages before she can leave, as she is so close to doing. He can feel it. And he knows that look.

“ _What?”_

“I’m . . . I apologize. I shouldn’t have allowed that to touch you.”

“You’re . . . you’re sorry that you . . . cared? What are you saying?”

“I’m trying to tell you,” it’s so _painful_ to do so, “that you meant something to me, personally. And that I understand that what I’ve done is far worse for having moved beyond . . . business.”

He speaks coolly because he cannot muster enough volume for anything more. But he trusts in his eyes—always too expressive, too-bright traitors to him and his thoughts—to convey what his tone cannot. She understands. The way she pales _assures_ him that she understands.

“Do _not_ tell me that,” she breathes, a hellfire heat in her weak voice. “Don’t you just _sit there_ and tell me that you _left me_ so that you wouldn’t have to be upset when you _killed me._ What is _wrong_ with you?”

Words that piece his heart.

“I don’t know.”

* * *

 

Locus completed his missions.

His mission was to maintain Emily Grey’s ignorance of the deeper machinations in place on her world. Where intimacy revealed too much of himself, surely, was the place where he had to draw the line. He did so by throwing up barrier after barrier between them—fewer words, disguised by the occupation of his mouth with the hot flesh of her neck that fit so sweetly between his teeth, against his lips. He did so by finding duties that drew him away from her so often that she ceased tracking them, taking him when she could and when it suited her own schedule, content with such. She didn’t note his excursions to bases neither Federal nor Republican, his camo active as he slipped away to meet with pirate and mercenary alike.

Felix mocked and questioned and needled his methods, and implied a depth of feeling for the Doctor that was neither accurate nor his place.

_Sure, Locs. Whatever you say—after all, it’s not like you wouldn’t know an emotion if it bit you in the ass. Oh, wait a second—_

_Enough._

_If she gets in the way, I’ll kill her if you don’t._

_She won’t._

Locus remained safe from Emily’s perception. What he was not sheltered from—what he had no armor against—was his understanding of her.

He knew what he was seeing when her happiness splintered.

She sat naked on the edge of his bed in Armonia with a sheet wrapped around her to guard against the encroaching winter beyond the window, frozen at the threshold of getting up to leave, her eyes fixed on her armor across the room.

“Emily.” He didn’t ask it, only stated it.

“Do you ever think about how _weird_ it is that a doctor should have to wear Spartan grade body armor 90% of the time?”

All her curiosity was present in her tone, but there was an absence to it, as well. A distance.

“If you’d told me back in grad school that _this_ is what I had to look forward to _—_ ”

“It’s a necessary precaution,” he assured her.

She turned her head to look at him with an exhaustion in her eyes utterly unrelated to how little she’d been sleeping.

“One that would be worth it,” she said, a crack in her shrill voice, as if it were shattering from within, “if my being safe actually helped anyone else—

“Not that I don’t _love_ bionics and amputations, and—and the challenge of some of those wounds you bring in, but with an average casualty count of 25 people per encounter, not to mention the bombings and raids and all _that_ , one can’t help but wonder if she’s accomplishing anything useful with all those IQ points.”

All the right emphasis was there in the words, but her heart was not. Locus imagined he could see a yawning void where it should be. This was the grief, which he perpetuated, that forced her escapist cheer.

He said nothing, and she recovered after a moment—her artifice, her delusion of hope restored. As nothing should, its return cut him down to the bone. It was an agony of guilt that broke his mind in two as it brought the knowing down on him:  He couldn’t stand to watch her hurt this deeply.

If were to continue hurting her, he could not stay near enough to her to see it.


	10. Chapter 10

She stares. Aghast, for a long while, before she laughs. She laughs so hard, so high, so shrill, that she doubles over with her arms wrapped around her waist and struggles to breathe. She is gasping when she lifts herself upright again, her smile desperately, _desperately,_ forcibly reapplied to her face for the first time since she’s come to him, and there are tears on her cheeks.

“You deserved to die, not us.”

Somehow, the words don’t hurt. Perhaps they can’t: there is too much agony carving out his heart and tying shut his throat from the sight of those tears alone already.

_Look at what you’ve done._


	11. Chapter 11

Locus did not tell Felix _why_ he wanted such a uselessly remote base targeted. He did not share the details of what could be found in which building, and which would be the deadliest coordinates. He did not tell him how much additional power it would require to penetrate the centermost medical bay, nor did he indicate that there were any such central target to begin with. He told Felix what was necessary. They arranged for Felix to communicate his troops’ movements to Locus in a timely manner.

The attack came at midday beneath the cover of fog.

Thirty soldiers died in a short, open field, some lounging, others training, their bodies shredding through the walls of the nearest buildings along with the shrapnel of the first volley. Twenty died in their barracks. Eleven were shot down from their firing positions as if the New Republic knew where to aim before they’d arrived.

Fourteen buildings were decimated, one of them a medical supply wing Felix _did_ have on his schematics. That was where Locus was when the first strike hit. That was where he stood when he hurled himself atop Emily Grey, knowing very well that this was the last time he would ever hold her, as the roof above them burst into shards of metal and plastic and the walls around them groaned.

He guided her free of the rubble, his arm across her shoulders, holding her in a hunch with her head beneath the shelter of his, forcing her to scamper sideways as he swept her toward the door, through the medical wing, and out its rear exit. To their right stood a bunker of their more vital and limited medical equipment, and it was there that he left a protesting Emily with orders not to leave until the shelling stopped. He did not speak to her again during the fight, nor for hours after. When he did, it was because she forced him.

Behind the shield of a single curtain that segregated them from the rows of gurneys beyond, she cornered him. Given how few of their casualties had lived long enough to receive medical care, it was in no way stunning that she should be ready to come after him so soon, but he had hoped, somehow, to delay her inevitable attention to the places where his armor was scratched and scored. He was unhurt beneath it. He and Felix had seen to that. But she insisted nevertheless. How could she not?

Emily asked him nothing beyond the requisite medical questions for long minutes he at once wished he could bypass, and freeze forever.

“You’re quiet even for you today,” was the first personal thing she said.

“I’m considering my actions in this skirmish.”

“Oh, of course. About those—you know, I _was_ wearing armor . . . but thank you anyway, for—”

“I shouldn’t have protected you.”

The sentence he’d cut off fell silent from her mouth as her jaw dropped. He imagined he could hear the unsaid words hitting the floor and breaking there, a hundred dull-edged fragments of thought and feeling.

“You are more than capable on your own. Diverting attention to ushering you around this base was ineffective, and will not happen again.”

Emily Grey was a genius. Her people skills were, much of the time, as clumsy as his own, but she was too sharp, too shrewd, for that to matter now. She closed her hanging jaw so tightly that her temples popped for a moment before she spoke, serenely stern. Any brightness of her voice was natural pitch alone.

 “Locus, if you are trying to tell me something, I think it would be a good idea if you just came out and said it.”

She blinked too many times as she pushed the order through her tight smile. Her eyes drove through his to the back of his skull. Like knives. Locus stared into the point just between them, the very base of the rise of her nose. It rendered her stare only negligibly less excruciating.

“As a soldier, I cannot afford distractions,” he informed her. Cool and firm, like a briefing. “Men died while I was defending _you,_ which is unacceptable. _”_

Her stonily guarded expression flashed something softer, those eyes _dissecting_ him, analyzing what he didn’t feel—and what he wouldn’t allow himself to feel. That was, after all, the point of this.

“Locus—”

“The preventable loss of soldiers,” he continued, before she could express something more concrete than his name, “is a waste of capital this army cannot afford if I am to complete my mission, retrieve the remainder of my paycheck, and escape this planet in a timely manner.”

The softness drained out of her face like blood chasing a blade from the wound. Her stricken expression remained frozen that way—blanched—until her lungs forced the release of the breath she was holding. As it gusted out of her, so did her shock. In its place there was only fury.

Emily did not permit herself grief or sadness. Anger, though, rose to a rolling boil beneath her smile with an almost sinister speed, in his previous experience. But this was beyond even that: this fury was cold, the boiling, explosive heat buttoned down by all the force of will that usually supported her forced and manic joy. There was no smile on her now.

“How very mercenary of you. I almost forgot that you aren’t _really_ a soldier.” She didn’t slap him. It only felt like it. “Not in this war—silly me.”

The pitch of her voice raced upward, toward that delighted, squealing quality it usually possessed, but it was a false and hollow mimicry.

“After all,” she said, tone some sick parody of a chirp, “our lives _are_ just your paycheck. You get to make your own orders about whose are worthy of your time. To think I expected any better—well. That won’t happen again before you _escape.”_

_No one is more worthy than you._

“You are not a matter of value, Emily. You are—”

“Do _not_ call me that, _”_ she hissed, the ugliest her voice had ever sounded, the real fury of a woman perfectly present in her real, whip-fast mind, a voice so sharp it sliced through her cheery veneer once and for all. “If you are only a contracted employee of the Federal Army of Chorus, then you will stay in your place and acknowledge your military superiors as such. _Soldier._ ”

_Mercenary._

“Of course, Doctor.” Such deferent acquiescence. He meant every ounce of the respect that weighed down the words.

_You are a matter of admiration._

It was his awe of her, beneath it all, that had brought her so dangerously close to his heart. There was more value to her passing whims than there was to the collective thoughts of her entire Army.

_You are a matter of what’s deserved._

And what she deserved was so much more than the betrayal of being loved by the person who would kill her.


	12. Chapter 12

She can only take so much more. He can see all the ways he’s broken her rising to the surface, signs of the cracks in her posture, her watery eyes, her clenched jaw grin.

She opens her mouth to say what he knows is goodbye. A bitter goodbye.

“Will you do it?”

He blurts the question before she can go. And it takes her a moment, her exquisite brilliance hampered by the weight of her hurt, to follow his thought process. When she does the smile splinters at its corners, flattening to something too soft for a grimace that still exposes her teeth.

“The injection?”

He nods. The smile’s last remains die on her face.

And she looks at him in silence.

He can remember the rhythm of her heartbeat, always too fast except when she slept. Except when she lay spent across his chest with drowsy eyes and a serene, self-satisfied whisper of a smile. He imagines that he can feel it now, slowing down, slowing down as his speeds up and her face falls. She is expressionless when she answers him.

“No.”


	13. Epilogue

Ortez doesn’t thank her out loud. It’s not a gift meant to be acknowledged. All he offers is a nod of understanding, and the only fair choice he’s ever offered her: whether to reply.

“Goodbye, Doctor.”

It’s long breathes and slow heartbeats in coming, at once tumultuous and terse, a quiver in her mouth and an ache in her eyes that could be for her, for him, for Chorus. He understands that he will never know. It’s slow in coming and built on a slippery foundation of clashing emotions. But it does come:

“Goodbye.”


End file.
